For whatever reason, my article about the first Vespers Service of the 2026 season did not make it into today's paper -- unless my failing sight has taken a gigantic turn for the worse! I am devoting this blog to what should have been in the...
I'm not sure when I first met Dr. Madeline Kalbach, Professor Emerita, University of Calgary. It might have been back in 2015 when she was a guest speaker over at the Oysterville Schoolhouse Lecture Series that Diane Buttrell organized for a...
It was sprinkling out but even so, I stepped off the porch onto the wet grass to shake out my dust rag. Charlie Talbott had come over to help me with a picture-hanging project which entailed a step ladder and some high (long undusted) surfaces and...
I've never stopped to count the walls in this house but there must be at least 60 or 70 if you include the closet, bathroom, and hallway walls, in addition to the "usual" room walls and the wall space over doorways and in the little...
...I find that people worry about me. I dasn't go more than a day or two without writing a blog or someone is sure to call or write, "Are you okay?" And then I feel guilty. After all, the "Oysterville Daybook" does imply that I'm writing every...
Oysterville has been involved in a number of "firsts" over the years -- the location of the first County Courthouse and the first County Jail; the site of the first publicly financed school in the County; hosts of the first (and last?) Shoalwater...
Maddie. my 17-year-old-first-cousin-twice-removed (my Uncle Willard Espy's great-granddaughter!) has been visiting here with her mother, Jenny Hansen. As Jenny and I were getting acquainted, she mentioned that her grandmother, Virginia Brantley,...
As is their tradition, The Honorary Oysterville Militia will muster at 11 o'clock on Memorial Day Morning, Monday May 25, 2026, at the Cannon Courtyard across from the Oysterville Church. Friends and neighbors are invited to attend for our...
My May 6th column in the Chinook Observer, "Nahcotta: Going, Going, Gone..." was a lament concerning the escalating disappearance of one of our oldest villages on the Long Beach Peninsula. I think I got more reaction from it -- phone calls,...
My Cousin Alex and part of his family arrived the other night (or morning) in the wee hours -- around 1:30 a.m. I thought with a sleepy glance at the clock. I heard the bounce, bounce, bounce of a suitcase-on-rollers being pulled up the killer...
If you've lived in Pacific County for any time at all and, specifically, on the Long Beach Peninsula, you have at least heard of (and probably gone to) the Oysterville Community Club's Annual Rummage Sale. It happens each year on Memorial Day...
The following essay was written by my mother, Dale Espy, in September 1926 when she was a Junior at Redlands High School in California. The family had moved there that summer for my grandfather's health. My mother enrolled at the local high...